Presented as part of “Brooke O’Harra: I am Bleeding All Over the Place: Studies in directing or nine encounters between me and you” (May 16–24) and the spring R&D Season: VOICE.
O’Harra’s “I am Bleeding All Over the Place…” is a protracted performance in the form of a series of studies on directing. The New Museum presents the first three of nine studies that comprise this two-year project. Each iteration takes a variety of forms: Some will be clearly scripted, scored, and rehearsed to perfection, while others will be developed or literally “written” in front of an audience. This examination of the director’s role through different encounters argues that bodies are never neutral. “I am Bleeding All Over the Place” proposes a kind of theater where each person operates as both reader and maker, and where the potency of a performance happens in the experiential, emotional, and phenomenological gaps produced by the encounter of bodies. Each study assumes the form of a public encounter.
“Are we in conflict?” is the first study in O’Harra’s ongoing project “I am Bleeding All Over the Place.” For this study, O’Harra will direct a group of performers (including Becca Blackwell, Babs Davy, Will Davis, Laryssa Husiak, Anna Kohler, and Caitlin McDonough-Thayer) as they address the project texts (written by O’Harra, Kristen Kosmas, Erin Courtney, and Heidi Schreck). The series of scenes are taken directly from the writers’ own daily experiences, drawn from recordings of quiet and unmarked encounters that are rife with desire and rage. O’Harra addresses the possibility that the experience of conflict may be gendered and that new strategies are needed for performing contemporary texts by women.